Participate in Radiohead’s remix “competition” via iTunes

Wildly-popular band Radiohead wants its users to remix its newest single, but …

Taking a page out of Trent Reznor's book, Radiohead has made its new single, Nude, more remix-accessible by making the track available in both GarageBand format and individual instrumental/vocal tracks. There are a few differences in strategy, however. While the NIN frontman offered the GarageBand file for free off of the band's website, to acquire the Radiohead tracks, you must download them off of the iTunes Store for $0.99 apiece.

The song is broken up into 5 "stems" in which one element of the song is represented in each. When all five stems are put together, you get a copy of the original signal. Available for download are the bass stem, drum stem, guitar stem, string FX, etc., and the voice stem. For $5.94 total, you can download all five stems and the original track, DRM-free. If you purchase the tracks before April 8, 2008, you will get an access code to download the GarageBand "Project File" at a later date. As of publication, this author did not yet receive an access code.

The hope is that users will remix the song and then upload it to Radiohead's remix site, a site which thus far has crashed every browser we have accessed it with. Once uploaded, the public voting and ridicule, begins. The top ten will receive an incredible prize package, featuring their songs on Radiohead's website. Incredible isn't it? The Terms and Conditions are pretty short for this type of thing, but they say, more or less, that you have no rights to the newly-created song, you don't own it, and you can't profit from it.

Radiohead made headlines in October by releasing its new album In Rainbows at a variable price rate, letting customers name their own price for the full download. With the band's mass popularity, this will no doubt succeed in generating more publicity for the single and drive album sales.